Techrights

Poul-Henning Kamp: Why Freedom in 'FOSS' Matters

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 20, 2024

A few months ago Poul-Henning Kamp wrote this article in (or for) ACM. It's not suitable for the "advertiser-friendly" corporate/mainstream/tech media, but ACM published it.

It covers some important points. Towards the end he sounds more like RMS. BSDs have more or less the same goals, but their methods or the trajectory (and licence) vary somewhat. Openwashing is more widely recognised as a growing problem. █

Poul-Henning Kamp: 'In retrospect, it seems clear that open source was not so much the goal itself as a means to an end, which is freedom: freedom to fix broken things, freedom from people who thought they could clutch the source code tightly and wield our ignorance of it as a weapon to force us all to pay for and run Windows Vista.'